View Share

Share ID

What is Anonymous Location Sharing?It's where you publicise your location and movements, but the viewer doesn't necessarily know who you are. This is in stark contrast to what generally happens today. Advertisers and data analysis companies have found that the plethora of location aware devices are an amazing source of revenue if they can attach your profile to your location. Consequently, most applications that provide location based services also sell personal information. We don't do this (because we have no idea who you are).

So if people don't know who I am, what's the point?Don't forget that you can tell particular people what your share ID is. This means that only the people you want to know will know, and you can change the share ID at any point you want. So, as an example, you can tell your spouse that you are on the way home, but you don't know how long it will take, so you email them a link to watch your progress. Check out the usage examples for more information.

Does it require GPS to be running, and drain my battery?While Spades can use GPS, and obtain better accuracy if it is on, it does not need GPS, or a GPS enabled phone. Spades can use your network signal to determine your location. The update period can be set by you, and so the application can be extremely battery friendly using less data than a chat application! We've tested it across a diverse range of phones, and the impact to battery life on the recommended update setting is around 60 minutes off total battery life - so most people on an average day are not likely to notice the difference.

How is it anonymous or secure?When you create an account you only provide a password (which is scrambled beyond recognition on your device using military grade encryption known as SHA1), we then provide you with a secret unique ID. As a result, no personal information is ever sent or stored by us. Furthermore, everytime your device sends an update, or initiates a share, it travels across an encrypted connection (HTTPS) - this means that even your data or network provider doesn't know what your secret unique ID is.

What's the catch? I don't see any adverts, how do you benefit out of this?There's no catch. OK, there's always a catch. We plan to have a paid service for premium features too. Right now though we aren't making anything from this, and we plan to always have a free version that provides the capability to perform anonymous location sharing. At the moment we're looking for people to help us test our software by downloading it and telling us what they think we can do to improve it. We plan to thank people that help us too, by providing them with special upgraded accounts going forward.

Why does your application and website look so visually unappealing (rubbish)?Because we're a bunch of geeks that have science degrees and failed art class. We have no idea what looks pretty or what is user friendly - we all collectively slept through those classes. Don't know, maybe they were all in the morning? Eitherway, you'll have to forgive us for the clunky-ness. If you send us some designs we can write the code to meet the design - and we'd very grateful by giving you credit and linking back to your portfolio (as long it's not full of adult material, as that would be awkward).

Who is using this application today?Anyone is entitled to download it and try it for free, and given that it's completely anonymous, we have absolutely no idea who is using it. We are thankful to those that are helping us test it out though, and if they send us a message through the "Send Feedback" button in the application, we will definitely respond!